The Bee Reads LOTR Episode 1: Concerning Allegory and Hobbits
From the heart of the Shire, through the depths of Moria, to the ends of Middle-Earth, it's The Babylon Bee Reads The Lord Of The Rings! In this episode of The Babylon Bee Reads, Kyle and Dan tell some of their personal stories relating to Tolkien's writings and discuss Tolkien's Foreword in which he aggressively denies that The Lord Of The Rings is an allegory. Subscribers also get to hear their discussion of the Prologue concerning hobbits, the Shire, and pipeweed. Be sure to check out The Babylon Bee YouTube Channel for more podcasts, podcast shorts, animation, and more. To watch or listen to the full podcast, become a subscriber at https://babylonbee.com/plans. We answer your comments and questions in the subscriber portion. Leave your letters at podcast@babylonbee.com. Foreword Our personal stories with Lord of the Rings Themes we've gotten out of the books in the past How fleeting evil is. History is cyclical, but the faithful need not worry. (Tom Bombadil) ("There was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach") Small people doing ordinary deeds can change the world - Diana Glyer Good vs. evil, obviously. But more specifically, the asymmetric war of good and evil. Good is eternal. Evil is fleeting. Evil is just twisted good. They are not on equal footing. Tolkien's almost overly defensive foreword -- extreme insistence that it's not an allegory Says if it were an allegory for WW2, the Free Peoples would have used the Ring. Prologue Setting the stage: Middle-Earth as myth and an alternate history of earth Hobbits are seemingly unimportant, yet they change the world Maps!
This is the very first episode of the Babylon Bee Book Club.
We were being very ambitious in that we decided our very first book would be Lord of the Rings, which is about 1,300 pages of awesome, depending on your edition.
It's still too short.
As we're going to see in the foreword, Tolkien got a lot of complaints about Lord of the Rings from fans and readers.
And the one that he said that he agreed with all of them was that it needed more content.
So I don't know.
That seems kind of like conceited a little bit, maybe.
I like thinking of Tolkien just sitting at his desk receiving all these letters.
And he's just like, yes, this one's a very good letter.
He's like, these guys are all idiots.
Crap, crap, crap.
This one says I should have written more.
This is a wise reader.
I'm Kyle Mann.
I'm the editor-in-chief of the Babylon Bee.
If you've never watched the Babylon Bee podcast or you don't know who the heck I am, that's fine.
Most people don't know who the heck I am.
This is Dan Coates.
He is the producer of the Babylon Bee podcast.
He's worked for us for over a year now.
He and I are big Tolkien aficionados.
And we decided that we would read through Lord of the Rings with Babylon B fans.
So if you want to read along with us on the Lord of the Rings with Babylon B people, I guess, then this is the podcast for you.
We're going to throw this in the main Babylon B podcast feed.
So if you're a regular Babylon B subscriber and you get this and you're like, what the heck?
I don't like Lord of the Rings.
I like Game of Thrones or whatever.
You can just skip this.
Just get out of here.
We don't need you.
Just keep going.
We may eventually break this off into a separate feed, but for now, you're stuck with us.
So you can just skip this if you don't care about it.
But yeah, this is Lord of the Rings book club.
So we're going to read through the entire book.
And I think based on our pacing, it'll take a couple of years.
We may end up speeding up the pacing if that's taking too long and maybe make it try to last like a year or whatever.
So we'll figure out.
You know, we may just double up the releases of the episodes or read more chapters per episode or whatever.
Right now, our plan is to read about a chapter an episode.
And then at the end of the episode, we'll tell you what to read for the following week.
So for this episode, we're going to cover the foreword and the prologue of Lord of the Rings.
If you haven't read the forward and the prologue, you can pause and go do that.
If you have, that's okay.
If you haven't and you don't want to, that's okay.
We'll tell you everything you need to know.
This is very general.
We'll summarize it.
Don't even read the book.
Just listen to us.
It's like going to your secret sensitive church.
You don't need to read the Bible.
You just let your pastor summarize it for you.
So that's fine.
But yeah, we're going to cover the forward and the prologue in this episode.
Next episode, we're going to cover a long expected party, the very first chapter of Lord of the Rings.
And we'll see if we need to pick up the pace after that.
This is an experiment for us too.
So we'll figure it out.
It could be a total disaster.
Complete and total disaster.
We'll just see how it goes.
We'll see how this one feels.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So let's get going.
Now, this is going to be fairly informal.
I know there's like reading clubs and book clubs where it's like very deep analysis.
When I say we're Tolkien fans, I mean like we've read the books.
I've read them multiple times and I just love them.
I'm not really like a Tolkien scholar.
I don't have a ton of information, but we are like your buddies that are reading Lord of the Rings.
And honestly, I think it's really good for the world if people would read more like really long, really good fiction.
And I hope that that's what this does is encourages you to kind of get out of the 24-7 news cycle and just read something that is like completely timeless.
We're going to start by just talking about our personal stories with Lord of the Rings, any history that we have with the books, so you know where we're coming from.
Personally, I kind of have a funny story when it comes to Lord of the Rings.
I checked out the two towers from the bookstore at my elementary school.
Same school you went to?
Yeah.
Without doxing us.
And I checked out the two towers because you guys remember that accelerated reader program, AR?
Yeah.
You had to get like a certain number of points.
That was a lot of points and you're like, oh man.
I think two towers was enough to like double the number of points I needed for the year.
Like it was that, it was that much, you know, because other kids are reading like green eggs and ham or whatever for a half a point.
You see two towers on the shelf and it just starts to glow.
400 points.
400 points for that.
I'm doing it.
I did not know it was part of a larger series.
So I checked it out and I read all of Two Towers and I was like, oh, it's a great book and returned it.
I mean, I'm sure the book said somewhere like continued in Return of the King or, you know, whatever.
I just didn't, I didn't pick up on it.
I wasn't a very bright kid.
So I read Two Towers.
It starts with Boromir against a tree, pinned against the tree with like 15 arrows and Legolas and Aragorn and Gimli and they're like there like trying to figure out what's going on and then they go off and chase the orcs.
And I'm just like.
You're just like, this is a great intro to a book.
More books should start this way.
It felt like a movie, like a Marvel movie or something that starts with an action scene and you're like, okay, what's going on?
I'm trying to figure it out.
Like, oh, this is cool.
You know, who is that Boromir character?
You know, there'll probably be a twist that comes in later.
And, you know.
I wonder if you're the only person in history that started Lord of the Rings by like just jumping in midpoint and still enjoying it and be like, oh, this is great.
I mean, the writing is just, we'll talk more about this, but the writing just stands up.
It's great writing.
Yeah.
It's great prose.
It's great poetry.
And so I loved it.
And then I think in sixth grade, our teacher, Mr. Pease, did you have Mr. Pease?
No.
He was our English teacher and he had us all read The Hobbit.
I didn't read The Hobbit till eighth grade with, what was her name?
Mrs. Something.
She had us read The Hobbit.
I'm sure she feels real great if she's listening.
Mrs. Something made us read this.
And Mr. Pease had us read The Hobbit, which I don't know if that's typical.
Is it typical to read The Hobbit in elementary school?
It seems like it's a classic, but it doesn't seem like it.
It's not to kill a mockingbird or something.
Like I said, I read it in eighth grade for my English class.
Yeah, we went to the same school.
So maybe that school was just born into that.
I don't know.
Yeah, I don't know.
So I read The Hobbit and then I saw, oh, this is related to that Two Tower, that weird Two Towers book I read.
Yeah.
Eventually, I think it was eighth or ninth grade that I was in when the movies were like announced.
And at that point, I loved The Hobbit, loved Two Towers.
I went and checked out all the books from my local library and I read through the Lord of the Rings and I was just like, this is my identity.
Like I am a Lord of the Rings fan.
This is who I am now.
I think I discovered myself.
I think when you're in junior high, you're in late junior high, you're like, you're looking for something to, you're looking for some identity to attach yourself to.
If it's like, I'm an emo kid or I'm a, you know, looking for that group or that crowd.
I don't know that I found a group so much as like, I want to live in Middle Earth.
Like this is where I'm.
It's probably cheaper than buying a bunch of stuff at Hot Topic and getting the eye line.
Well, I did that too.
Oh.
Yeah, I don't know.
I ended up going and seeing the movies.
I think I saw Fellowship 11 times in ninth grade.
Wow.
And the day it came out, me and Treg, you know, Trag, our buddy, we walked to the movie.
We made t-shirts.
We printed out t-shirts.
And we walked to the movie theater from our high school.
this is before like the internet when like you could like just order a shirt online with whatever whatever print you want you guys actually went to uh well we bought the like silkscreen thing that you could print out on your own home printer Wow.
And I'm sure it fell apart after like one washing or whatever.
You know, we printed like Fellowship of the Rings.
I think Treg Study still has them.
I got to ask you, you know, I got to get them wearing them on the podcast.
You got to totally get that.
We walked to the movie theater, waited in line for like eight hours, saw it at midnight.
You know, that's, that's before that they like did the 6 p.m. because now like the day before it comes out, you can watch it at like 6 p.m. or something.
Like they come with some loophole that, oh, it's come out in this part of the world.
So we can all watch it.
Oh, okay.
You know, I think in Pacific time, you can go see it the night before now.
I was never in on like the go out the first night it comes out.
I'm like, wait till the crowds die down.
I'll check it out later.
I did it for the prequels of Star Wars, which why.
And then I did it for, I did it for Spider-Man, the first Spider-Man with Toby McGuire.
Yeah, don't you just look back at your life and go like, I could have been doing other important things and I was standing in line for.
No, I think I look at it more like I'm old now with children and I never would do that now.
Yeah.
But it's something that I'm glad that happened.
Okay.
I'm glad I did it at the time because I won't do it now.
And again, now you don't need to do that anymore because now you can go watch.
And with movie theater is dying.
You can go watch it at HBO Max or whatever the night before or the day that it comes out or whatever.
So I don't know.
That's my little story with Lord of the Rings.
I feel like every time I return to the books, it's like coming home.
To me, Middle earth, and when I read about the Shire, I'm like, this is where I want to be.
It gives me such peace to read about the Shire and be like, I am worked and transported to this world where everything is right.
And yeah, obviously they have their saw on and these characters that come and these horrible events that transpire.
But just that like safe haven of the Shire to me is like every time I read those chapters.
And we'll get into that when we get to chapter one.
But yeah.
And for me, Lord of the Rings is not so much like, it's the story or the, you know, the dialogue or the prose, even though I love all that.
To me, it's this place.
It's a world that Tolkien created, you know, and every time I read it, I'm just transported.
And more than anything else, more than any other book I've ever read.
So that's my little story with my personal story with Lord of the Rings.
You said you read it later in life.
Well, funny story.
So I did read The Hobbit eighth grade.
And the funny part of my story is that I think I got the box set, The Hobbit, Fellowship, Two Towers, Return of the King.
I got kind of similar to that paperback set.
I got that for Christmas one year from my grandma.
And I think that would have been about third or fourth grade.
And I probably flipped through it various times in my life.
I never committed to reading it because it is kind of a commitment.
You kind of go, okay, am I going to get through?
And I'm not a big reader in general.
Just various things that hit my interest.
I'll read it.
And I think I was about 30 until I decided, you know what, I'm going to read it.
And I think that's after I saw the movies.
I've seen the movies probably dozens of times.
That was four years ago for you?
Yeah, not that long ago, about five years ago now.
Maybe I was a little younger than 30, maybe 29.
Stuff was going on in my life.
I think like parents were splitting.
My wife was pregnant.
A lot of crazy changes going on.
And I think I knew deep down in my soul, I needed to read something that would remind me of what's good in the world and what's true.
And, you know, I'm a, you know, obviously we have the Bible and we're Christians.
But like, I think I, you know, just something that I needed to open up and just like remind myself there's things that are good going on in the world and it's not all craziness.
It's not all chaos.
So yeah, I read through fellowship real quick, two towers real quick.
It was just all like a whirlwind.
I just read it.
Like I just picked it up and kept reading.
Do you see the books as three separate books?
Do you see them as one?
No, it's just, it's all one.
And it's nice that you can cut it up and maybe dabble in this one, dabble, you know, but it's all meant.
It's all one book, for sure.
He split it for publishing reasons, if I remember correctly.
Yeah.
Basically, he brought this giant tome to the publishers and they're like, nobody's going to buy this and read it.
Yeah, his story of writing the book is super interesting to me that he's just like, he's a literature professor.
He wants to create this language for elves.
And he's like, you know what?
If I'm going to do the language, I need to have a history and a mythology so that my language makes sense.
Isn't that kind of like what his thought process was?
It was kind of like, I need to anchor this in a myth, mythological origin or something.
Yeah, maybe that's a good jumping off point to kind of jump into the foreword and what he was talking about there.
For him, yeah, Middle-earth and Lord of the Rings is almost secondary to what he was trying to do.
Yeah.
It wasn't his original intention.
Well, I guess we could talk about the allegory thing now.
Yeah.
Isn't that crazy that you're that level of genius that you can write like probably the best novel of the 20th century and not even be trying to?
Yeah.
You're like, I'm going to write this history as a side note to what I really want to do.
It is a giant footnote for his languages.
And it's a better fantasy book than anyone else has ever written.
Right.
So let's talk about the allegory element.
This is something that if you have the, like one of the, any of the recent editions of Lord of the Rings, there's a foreword in there.
I know there's been some different editions published with different forwards and prologues.
Any of the recent ones have this forward where he talks about, he gets very, Tolkien almost gets defensive in this foreword about like Lord of the Rings is not an allegory.
And he's very insistent about this.
Yeah.
So compare with C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, where Aslan is Jesus.
Like he gives the Jesus.
I don't even think, I think Narnia goes beyond allegory because in Tolkien's mind, Aslan is not representative of Jesus.
He is Jesus.
Yeah, everything is one-to-one.
Well, it's not even, but I'm saying it goes beyond that.
It goes beyond the one-to-one thing.
It goes that in his mind, Aslan is, is Jesus just manifested in that world.
Right.
So like when the, I think at the end of the end of Voyage of the Dawn Treader, they meet Aslan on the edge of the world and he's telling them like, you're never going to come back to Narnia again, but you must find me in your world.
So it's like, it's as if there's a second world and Jesus appeared there too, and he just happened to take the form of a lion.
So to him, it was beyond, it was beyond one-to-one allegory.
It's like Aslan is Jesus in Lewis's mind.
Tolkien is like hates allegory.
I think when we had Diana Gleyer on the Babylon B podcast, one of the favorite stories that I ever heard was how Lewis ended up throwing the manuscript for Narnia in the trash because Lewis was like, this is garbage.
Why are you reading this in our group?
And Tolkien accepted the criticism and basically wasn't going to continue with it, right?
Yeah.
He wasn't going to have the right.
There was another friend that said, oh, I think you got something here.
Let's take it out.
And then he went back into the garbage to pull it out.
It was Lewis throwing away.
Lewis threw away the basically like his first chapter of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe.
Oh, okay.
So the Tolkien, Tolkien, Tolkien made it clear that he didn't like it.
And Lewis was like, oh, man.
Yeah, Tolkien said, I cordially dislike allegory and all its manifestations and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence.
I much prefer history, true, or feign, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of a reader.
I think that may confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader and the other in the purpose domination of the author.
So Tolkien's goal is to write history and myth, and he communicates truth through that, but it's not in the same way allegory creates truth.
You got to imagine he's sitting at his desk and he's getting all this fan mail.
Oh, I'm so glad you wrote Lord of the Rings.
It's such a great story that shows how bad the Nazis were and blah, blah, blah.
And he's just like, what?
Like, I didn't write it for that.
Yeah, I love how you just made Gandalf the perfect representation of Jesus.
Right, exactly.
And he just bends his angry forward.
Like, that's not what I was doing.
Yeah, exactly.
He felt the need to write this in a foreword to the new edition.
I did not do that.
Yeah.
The interesting thing is I think that Lord of the Rings communicates truth.
It does have Christ figures.
Yes.
It has Eregorn.
It has Gandalf.
You know, you can even look at Samwise or Frodo as in some ways exhibiting like Christ-like sacrificial love, giving themselves up for this greater cause.
Gandalf literally dying and then rising again, you know, and returning in a glorious state.
Like, I think there are clear parallels, but for him, it was drawing on this universal idea of myth, where this Christ figure can appear in Christian literature.
It can appear in other cultures because it's true.
Like, I'm not saying that it's in the sense of like, you know, like Christ was a myth because he was drawn from other cultures, but in the sense where God has kind of written this on the hearts of all cultures.
And so Tolkien wanted an English myth, right?
He wanted an English mythology that communicated these ideas.
Yeah, it kind of seemed like the Norse had their myths.
And coming from England, writing as an Englishman, he's thinking we need our own kind of origin myth to kind of unify our culture.
I would imagine if you're in England, you're Anglo-Saxon in heritage, you're conquered by the Vikings, conquered by the French.
He probably felt like there wasn't anything like that in his culture that binded them back in history and time.
So I think he kind of thought.
They had some stuff, right?
Like they had, you know, the King Arthur legend and all this.
Sure.
It's just not on the same scale or it's not, there's not deities like that are, like they believe in God, you know, obviously they were a Christian nation, but they didn't have this like Like, like, like in Norse mythology, did people actually believe it?
Or was it like stories, you know?
I think if they, even if they didn't believe it, it was stories.
It still rooted their whole culture and their whole civilization, their whole society.
They all had this in common.
It kind of binded them together.
So maybe he was thinking, you know, England, because you got to think of like Christianity, especially in the modern times or even in the medieval times, it was kind of like an import.
It wasn't something that united their whole people going all the way back, I would think.
So I think in the foreword or in the prologue, he kind of writes about the need to, or maybe I'm thinking of something outside of this completely, but he kind of felt the need to have that, have some kind of origin story.
So the whole, the whole of Middle-earth is kind of like history before history, that this is an age prior to all of our records.
Yeah, that's one interesting element.
I don't even think I picked up on this when I was younger, that Middle-earth is supposed to be Earth.
It's not.
It's not a different planet.
It's not a different planet or some other, you know, it's not some other universe or some like alternate history.
It's like, this is our history in a mythological sense.
Right.
Like, yeah, he knows it's not true, but at the same time, it's very true.
Yeah, he says something in the prologue of concerning hobbits about how they're distantly related to us and we don't see them very much anymore because they're real good at hiding.
Right.
But he's saying like they're still around, like in his mythology.
They're still out there.
That's kind of a fun thing for.
Yeah, and he's not just doing that as like a meta-humor thing.
He's like actually trying to tell you, the reader, like, this is history.
And there's a few other authors that have done that besides just mythological authors.
Robert E. Howard did that with the Conan stories.
They all take place in kind of this alternate history sort of like prehistory of medieval Europe.
Yeah, I think one of the early reviews of Lord of the Rings, and maybe it was even C.S. Lewis, I think he had a review of Lord of the Rings that was published.
And he said, more than any other book, it's like, this is all, when I read this, it feels like history.
I'm not reading something that's just totally foreign.
It's just like, this is something that was rooted.
Like, it's got dates, times, reigns and periods of kings and kingdoms coming, kingdoms going.
And then all these characters are just like rooted within that.
It's not, oh, here's dwarves.
Here's elves.
Here's, it's like, no, this all goes back and everything's rooted with genealogy and language and everything.
Everything has a context.
When you read it, you feel like you're reading something in a context.
Yeah, I'm sure we'll have a lot of discussion about Tom Bombadil throughout the series, especially fellowship.
But one cool thing about Tom Bombadil to me, I don't know if he's a controversial figure, but to me.
He's the best.
Yeah, he's great.
I mean, we're going to convert all of you to Tom Bombadil fans because that's.
That was one of the comments that we got on our premium post on the Babylon Bee website.
It was like, I hope you skipped that Tom Bombadil chapter.
It's like, what are you talking about?
One of the best chapters in the whole book.
Well, I'll explain when we get there.
We'll help you.
We'll help you understand to the Bombadil why he's so good.
One of the great things about Bombadil is what, so in a normal book, you get to a beat in the story and you go, okay, why is this character here?
And it's like, well, because he's serving the narrative function of challenging the hero to get him to commit this, to commit to his quest so that we can break into Act Two.
What's cool about Bombardil is it's like, why are they encountering Bombadil?
Because that's where he lives.
Right.
Because they're walking through Middle Earth and that's where Tom Bombadil lives.
It's not like a plot point.
He's not there to advance the plot.
In a lot of ways, it's like, well, Tom Bombadil lives there.
That's where they went.
So what do you want me to do?
Yeah.
Can't go around it.
He's there.
Tom Bombadil.
He's already there.
So you get this sense of this world that's very lived in.
There's a history to it.
Things that are seemingly random out of the blue happen because there are characters that live in this world.
It's a lived-in world.
Yes.
It's not, I don't know if you've ever read Harry Potter, J.K. Rowley.
I couldn't get into it.
I'm not a huge fan, but I read all seven of them.
I respect anybody who can write seven novels and have them make some sense, you know?
It kind of seemed like, and when we talk to Diana Gleier, who hopefully we can get on this podcast, that would be awesome.
Yeah, we'll get her as a guest soon.
It kind of seemed like she had respect for her as an author, that she was able to build a world and a culture and a language and a setting for her book.
Yeah, but it's not on the level of Middle Earth.
But the thing about her, I almost disagreed with Glier in that I don't think she's a good world builder.
She did make a world that a lot of people fell in love with, but she almost stumbled into it because her world building style is like get to book three and go, oh crap.
Like, how do they deliver letters in this world?
Oh, owls, you know, or whatever.
I mean, that was obviously in book one, but you get the idea.
When she gets to a plot point, she builds the world around it.
The books have been, the Harry Potter books have been out, you know, and completed for 10 or 11 years now.
And she's still making up stuff about the world.
Like, she's like, did you know that Dumbledore was trends?
You know, or whatever.
And like, she's just throwing stuff out there because she's still figuring it out.
Which is so funny if she's trying to appease certain people because she's a kind of respect her now because everybody hates her.
But compare with, so, so Tolkien did the same thing that Rowling did where he's evolving this world, but he did it before he got to the three books part.
Well, at least before he got to these three, we'll talk a little bit about how Hobbit changes because the world of the Hobbit is very different from the world of the Lord of the Rings.
Hobbit is much more of the Harry Potter style of like, oh, I need a plot point.
I need a fun action sequence.
I guess there's spiders in Merkwood, you know, whereas Lord of the Rings is very much like, I have this whole world built and they're just walking through it.
So Hobbit is more like that.
So I think that's something you get out of the foreword.
And definitely that this is a world that's already been built.
He's writing this whole novel as like an afterthought, which blows my mind.
He's like, oh, I need this story because, you know, the world I already built exists.
So, and he's getting these letters, probably people saying, oh, the ring means this.
The government power.
The elves mean this.
Yeah, this is the nuclear bomb.
This is the Nazis.
This is this.
So in the foreword, he's a little overly defensive against that.
He wants to say this is not an allegory.
This is not one-to-one to anything you want it to mean.
I definitely love, there's a part in the foreword.
I'm trying to scan my page to find it, but basically he kind of responds directly to the idea that this is about World War II.
He's like, even if I lived during World War II and you lived during World War II and my book came out right around World War II, that doesn't mean that a book is about World War II.
Because if it was, then the Allies would have used the ring.
Yeah, he says the real world does not resemble the legendary war in its process or its conclusion.
If it had inspired or directed the development of the legend, then certainly the ring would have been seized and used against Sauron.
He would not have been annihilated, but enslaved.
And Baradur would not have been destroyed, but occupied.
And he goes on from there.
Yeah, he goes on.
The Hobbits would have been held in contempt by both sides.
They probably wouldn't have survived.
So it makes me, that's really fascinating to me.
Like just this idea that he probably had very unconventional views that couldn't be pinned down to like, oh yeah, these are the good guys.
These are the bad guys.
Tolkien believes whatever I believe.
He has his own political spectrum, political views.
He's not writing a book to get his views out.
It's a book for everybody.
Yeah.
Now he goes on to say, an author cannot, of course, remain wholly unaffected by his experience.
But the ways in which a story germ uses the soil of experience are extremely complex.
And so he goes on and says that he, because he fought in the war, he has felt the oppression of war.
He says, by 1918, all but one of my close friends were dead.
So he's like, he's acknowledging, yeah, experience informs your creativity and your stories and narratives you have in your head.
But to me, you can use Lord of the Rings and you can find Christ figures.
You can find truth, but it's communicated in a very different way because it's not like, oh, I want to write a story where I tell people about this Jesus character and then they see Jesus.
It's, I just want to write a good, true, and beautiful story.
There's truth in there because there's universal human truth that we can all look at and say, yes, that is true.
That is objectively good.
That is objectively beautiful.
And from there, we can pull out and find applications.
Right.
But you're skipping a step if you say Gandalf is Jesus.
Exactly.
I think it's the point.
Yeah.
Well, let's, why don't we go to subscriber exclusive segment?
Okay.
Are we about good there?
I think.
What are we at?
30 minutes or so?
30.
Yeah, okay.
Okay.
We're so professional that we just hit it.
We hit it right on the dot.
300.
These are going to be a little bit shorter than B podcast.
We'll probably do 30 minutes free and maybe a 10-15 exclusive.
The exclusive segment, we're going to continue going on forward in prologue.
We'll talk a little bit about some extra stuff in there that we want to dig into.
And in future episodes, we are going to be responding to reader comments about the book.
So actually, you know what we could do is we can pull, if you can pull up that thread from the website, Patrick, if you're logged in, we have some comments from readers when we first announced the podcast.
We go down to the premium section.
So we'll interact with some subscriber comments right now.
If you want to follow along and interact, subscribe to the Babylon B, BabylonB.com slash plans.
And we'll have weekly threads where we interact to talk about our favorite parts and all of this.
Thanks for joining us for the first episode of the Lord of the Rings Book Club.
This is going to be a lot of fun.
And read the long expected, A Long Expected Party, chapter one, for next week.
And sorry if this Christmas tree is out of date.
We don't know when this is coming out.
Peace out, everybody.
Peace.
Drop your letters with comments and questions for Kyle and Dan at podcast at babylonbee.com.
To watch or listen to the rest of this show, become a Babylon Bee subscriber at babylonbee.com slash plans.
Coming up next for Babylon B subscribers.
Aw, yeah.
Welcome to the subscriber lounge.
Very natural.
Yeah.
Hobbits seem magical.
They have this subtle sense of magic about them.
It's like how to live your life well.
Be like a hobbit.
Good in terms of creativity.
You're writing something that's just enough like your world and yet different.
There's this idea where they're kind of like in harmony with their surroundings.
They're not, they're not destroying the shire to build like, you know, strip malls.
Yeah.
Kyle and Dan would like to thank Seth and Dan Dylan for buying us cool swords and paying the bills.
Adam Ford for creating our jobs.
Ethan Nicole for creative direction and all the writers at the Babylon Bee.
Matthew McDavid for guiding studio operations.
Patrick Green for show production.
Catelyn Patty for Laugh Tracks, the Babylon Bee subscribers who make what we do possible.